


and all the wars were done

by finalizer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M, he gets himself captured by the resistance, hux does not, kylo returns to the light side
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-17 10:28:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5865913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finalizer/pseuds/finalizer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hux knows he did everything in his power to serve the First Order, and if he did fail at the end, at least he could say he did not <em>surrender</em>.<br/>The same could not be said for Kylo Ren.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and all the wars were done

**Author's Note:**

> • i was explicitly told not to write this by at least 10 people  
> • i wrote it anyway  
> 

It’s not until he hears familiar footsteps treading towards the cell they’ve been keeping him in that he opens his eyes — it’s a steadily paced gait, each step laced with an underlying hint of aggression. Hux used wrack his mind for an explanation of his odd ability to recognize Ren’s footsteps amongst those of all the personnel on board the Finalizer. He stopped thinking about it the moment he realized the answer was simple — his particular fondness for Ren, a jarring familiarity that Hux wouldn’t admit to.

He hears the steps slowing and halting at the cell door and it’s far from fondness now, what Hux finds coursing through his veins. It’s disgust, it’s abhorrence; a near nauseating churn in his stomach at the very thought of facing Ren now, with the rift between them, between the victorious Republic and those who refused to surrender.

It’s poor wording, the way it’s widely phrased. Hux doesn’t see it that way, not as surrender. _Traitors_ surrender, those too weak to fight and die for their cause, those who waver in the face of punishment for their actions. _War criminal_ , they call him, _murderer, monster_ , and it slips past Hux like empty gusts of air; he disregards the lies they spread, he knows he did everything in his power to serve the First Order, and if he did fail at the end, at least he could say he did not _surrender_.

It’d been unsurprising, subsequently, that Hux had found himself thrown into a dingy cell, a single meager cot at the far end, and left to rot until he was deemed fit to stand trial for his crimes against the Republic. _Crimes_ — as if the they themselves hadn’t done more damage — that he’d tried to repair, that the _Order_ had ceaselessly tried to repair.

And there he was, the captain going down with his ship.

Soft muttering from the other side of the door snaps him out of his reverie, and he curses the inevitability that Ren had heard it all, every last thought, every last image flickering through his mind. Ren is talking to the guards — multiple — stationed outside the cell, as if Hux posed any threat, let alone a formidable one, in the state he’s in. He absentmindedly lifts a hand to prod at the cut above his brow, filthy and untreated. He hadn’t been offered clean water; no one had come to examine his wounds in the time since he’d gotten locked inside. It wasn’t the most comfortable situation he’d ever found himself in, the claustrophobic cell far from the luxury treatment.

The bolt on the door clangs as its lifted off the outer hinges and Hux is ready for a smart remark, ready to snap at Ren, complain about the Resistance’s poor hospitality. He wants to, despite the parching dryness in his throat, see the hurt flash through Ren’s eyes as he realizes Hux will not cooperate.

But he says nothing.

Ren ducks inside, heavy door slamming shut behind him, and Hux can do little more than stare from his vantage point on the cot. Dressed in drab, ill-fitting garments, as if he’d taken whatever clothes were available for someone his size, Ren lifts his head to look at Hux, and no amount of overgrown locks could conceal the exhaustion painting shadows beneath his eyes, filling the hollows of his cheeks. Hux wonders if he himself looks the same, perhaps worse, isolated for days —  _weeks?_ he doesn’t know — and unable to force his eyes shut, mind too bustling to allow sleep. It’s not panic, but it’s close.

Ren’s saber is hanging from his belt, as if nothing had changed. If he’d been told, months ago on the bridge of the Finalizer, that one day Ren would be using his weapon to slaughter the very troops he fought alongside of, Hux would have laughed. Hux almost laughs now, halted only by the grave expression Ren is wearing.

He looks hesitant, younger than ever, unable to decide how best to broach the subject.

Hux doesn’t read his mind, not in the literal sense, but he knows that it’s what Ren is thinking — wondering what to say to someone whose world he’d ripped from beneath their feet in one swift motion.

"I suppose you could apologize," Hux starts for him, and Ren startles at his raspy tone. Hux sets his jaw, sickened by the sudden flash of pity in Ren’s eyes. "Then again, the list of your missteps is quite lengthy, I don’t know if we’ll have the time."

"Hux — "

Ren stops. He takes a small step forward, almost despairingly, then changes his mind and retreats back to the end of the room. He can tell Hux doesn’t want him near; indulges him.

Watching him warily, Hux settles for a contemptuous tone. "You could begin with your betrayal. Not of me, forget me, forget what your betrayal did to me, forget what you promised me, what you said time and time again we could accomplish together. Forget that, it means nothing to you, anyway."

Ren stares in silence, allowing Hux to hurl accusations. It’s almost audible, how hard he’s gritting his teeth together to keep himself from shouting his rebuttal.

"You betrayed the Order — and the Supreme Leader, your damn Knights, everything you stood for," Hux is distantly aware of his voice raising in both volume and tempo, but does nothing to level it — too overwhelmed by the sound of his own voice following days of suffocating isolation, too infuriated by Ren’s presence to keep himself in check. It’s unlike him, letting his emotions slip past the cold mask he wore, for his words to leave his lips honest and drenched in hurt, but he doesn’t see the point of concealing it anymore. Before whom, _Ren_? _The Resistance_? — those just waiting to condemn him to a wreck of a life, chained in an airless room until he withers and dies. There was no reason he shouldn’t go out kicking and screaming.

"At least, everything you claimed to have stood for," Hux pauses, narrowing his eyes. "Sitting here, looking at you now, looking at where I am now, I’m starting to wonder if there ever was a single word out of your mouth that wasn’t a blatant lie, considering which side you’re standing on. Hard to believe your _mother_ would so graciously, so eagerly accept you back after all you’ve done, after who you’ve killed, unless it was all orchestrated from the very start — your little game, playing the parasite growing freely inside the Order, protected by the highest authority."

"She didn’t know."

Ren’s genuine response quiets whatever Hux was going to throw at him next. The admission comes unexpectedly, and Ren himself seems taken aback by the words that’d left his lips. He catches Hux’s eye and forces himself to continue, to elaborate, if only to smother the nauseating silence blossoming between them.

"I planned it," Ren says, "not from the very beginning, but began early enough to keep my mind intact from Snoke’s _teachings_."

He spits the word like it’s poison and Hux thinks back on the nights Ren had spent in his quarters aboard the Finalizer, mask off and emotions dancing plain as day on his face, and wonders if any of them had been real, if he’d been underestimating Ren’s ability to lie for all the years he’d known him. He’d always seemed so eager, so desperate to prove to the Supreme Leader just how powerful he could be, and it registers in Hux’s mind that it was his own naiveté that got him into his current situation — Snoke playing Ren, Ren playing him right back, and Hux caught dead center in the middle of it all, thinking he had a part to play in the grand scheme of things. He didn’t. He was as much of a pawn as he’d used to think Ren was to Snoke.

"That’s nice to know," Hux snaps. "And what was I? A distraction?"

"I never intended for it to end this way for you," Ren growls, unable to keep it to himself any longer. "For you to end up here. Do you really think this is what I wanted for you?"

Hux doesn’t spare a second for deeper thought, retorts with the first, most obvious question springing to mind. " _Then what did you intend?"_

His voice cracks, and he knows it’s not his dry throat that causes it. Ren knows too — Hux can tell by the way his dark eyes widen almost imperceptibly, the way he folds in on himself like he’s preparing for a chiding.

Hux relishes in the hurt he’s evoking and delivers the final blow. His tone drops, cold and quiet, as he meets Ren’s eyes. "Did you expect me to die? Get myself consumed by the explosion — go down with the Finalizer? I suppose that would be your train of thought, Ren, the easy way out. Have me killed, seemingly on accident, to keep your conscience clean, to avoid this confrontation we’re having, to pretend nothing had ever happened between us. It’d be so much nicer to regard me as a fallen enemy now, than to look me in the eye and listen to me prattle on about how you’ve betrayed me, wouldn’t it?"

The reply is almost inaudible, a single syllable nearly drowned out by the blood rushing in Hux’s ears. It’s no less crushing when it slips past Ren’s lips.

" _Yes_."

Hux stares at Ren, he doesn’t know how long, until his chest constricts and he remembers to breathe.

Ren breaks the silence first and it’s greatly appreciated; Hux wracks his mind for words and finds he’d be unable to form a response no matter how many days he’d be given to do so.

There’s a bitter scoff of a laugh on Ren’s part, then, "Of course that’s how you interpret it — that I _wanted_ you dead."

Hux tilts his head in question, albeit involuntarily, an obvious display of that being exactly how he’d understood Ren’s unequivocal confession.

"It’d be _easier_ ," Ren’s voice is low and unsteady enough for Hux to be concerned, "if you’d — if you were gone. That doesn’t mean I wanted you dead. Doesn’t mean I want you dead now, I just — "

His words jumble together and Hux thinks that if he weren’t blindly furious, he’d find Ren’s nervous babbling endearing. That not being the case, their current surrounding not ones fit for comforting words and soft caresses, Hux barely suppresses the undignified urge to spit in Ren’s face.

"What did you expect would happen instead?" he snaps. "That I’d be welcomed into the arms of your mommy dearest, embraced as an ally, rather than swept aside into a rotting cell until the day came that they got all they wanted from me, found me useless enough to finally, graciously dispose of me? Did you think that just because I fucked you I’d be forgiven? I can’t tell if that’s sentiment or your sheer idiocy."

"I like to think it’s the first."

It was the most straightforward confirmation of his feelings that Ren had ever dared to utter in Hux’s presence, so much bolder than the whispered nothings he’d failed to withhold when Hux had fallen asleep tangled in Ren’s bedsheets, and Ren’s confessions had slipped away into the dark, heard by no one but himself, forgotten by morning. 

Hux struggles to keep his voice level. "They’re one and the same."

Ren blinks and it’s infuriating that now, of all times, when Hux would love to read Ren’s emotions from his painfully revealing expressions, they are nowhere to be seen. Ren’s face is impassive, more opaque than the mask he’d once worn.

Hux doesn’t know what it is that sends him spiraling off the edge. He’s raising his voice before he’s aware he’s doing it.

"What did you think would happen, Ren? Be honest with me _, because I’d truly love to know_. I wonder if it’d ever gotten through your thick skull that this was _war_ , two sides of a _war_ and only one emerging victorious, the other slaughtered."

Ren took a breath, preparing to interrupt, to deny what Hux was saying, but Hux didn’t give him a chance to do so.

"Don’t say that’s not true. It’s _slaughter_ — not just death, death is the easiest way out — but imprisonment, retreating into hiding, all of it. One side loses the war and loses everything, Ren. Not everyone has open arms to run back to. There’s those who lose _everything_ , everything they’ve ever worked for."

It didn’t take much thinking for Hux to realize he was talking about himself, and for Ren to arrive at the same conclusion.

"It wasn’t right, what Snoke was — "

" — Bullshit. Don’t give me that bullshit, Ren. Don’t hide behind Snoke. You did what you did and nothing can justify that when you’re too much of a coward to admit to any of it. You heard what they call me, what they’ve always called me — and do you see me cowering behind Snoke? Am I not owning up to my actions, taking due credit for all I’ve done?"

"It’s different," Ren growls, tries to growl, only to be shot down and silenced as Hux pushes off the cot and gets to his feet, takes a single, threatening step towards him.

"Is it?" Hux hisses. "Is it that different? Perhaps in terms of loyalty, where you’ve failed: abandoned the cause and those counting on you to bring the ideology to fruition. Other than that, Ren, you and I are the same. _Monsters_ , so they say."

He knows better than to goad Ren, than to push his buttons; he knows it’s reckless to push Ren towards his breaking point with every biting remark. But Hux finds something exhilarating in the recklessness, a jarring clarity, and with it comes the realization of what has to happen. He almost laughs at the simplicity, at the _irony_.

"Never mind all that," he goes on, poking and prodding, testing the waters to find Ren’s most vulnerable point, scavenging for the right thing to say to topple him over the edge. "What stings the most is your flippancy in regard to my fate."

It hit home.

"You think this is easy for me?" Ren barks. "Aiding one side and having to watch you suffer, alone, behind a bolted durasteel door because you were part of the other?"

"Is that my fault?" Hux demands. " — Oh, it is, isn’t it? You blame me? Brilliant, Ren. A noteworthy conclusion on your end. Suffice to say, I’m starting to reconsider your initial strategy — my death aboard the Finalizer — I daresay it would have been preferable to _this_."

Ren visibly stilled. "You don’t mean that."

"Don’t presume to know what’s going on inside my head."

"You don’t — "

 _"No, Ren!_ " Hux takes a long stride forward and barely resists the urge to pound his fists against Ren’s chest like an angered child. "You don’t get to make any more choices for me. Not after this. You have something to return to and, as ridiculous as it is, you have _someone_ to return to. A home, even. My work was my life — the Base, the ship, my rank, everything I’ve ever done led up to who I was. With that gone there’s nothing. No one." He allows himself a bitter smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. "For a moment, you know, I was foolish enough to think I did have a future with — "

He doesn’t finish the sentence. "But you made sure it wouldn’t happen, that instead I’d be counting days until they put me on trial and spit accusations in my face, lock me up and sweep my corpse out of a rotting cell when it finally ends."

Hux bites his lip to keep his voice from wavering. He’s made his decision. Ren is staring at him, speechless, and Hux tears his gaze away, dropping it to the lightsaber at Ren’s side.

His tone is pleading when he says, voice hardly above a broken whisper, "I can’t do that. Live like that — it’s not living. It’s worse than death, what you’re offering me."

Trailing Hux’s gaze to his belt, Ren starts at the realization of what Hux is asking him to do.

"No. _Never_."

Hux’s smile is humorless. "Coward."

It was worth a shot, he thinks, trying to evoke enough pity from Ren to end his punishment prematurely, blessedly and permanently.

"You mock them for calling us monsters," Ren snaps, "and then you ask this of me? Is that what you want — to prove them right?"

"I’m asking for proof of your humanity," Hux corrects him. "The one last thing you can give me. You think these — friends of yours will offer the same? That they’ll be merciful after all I’ve done against them? Do you truly think I will rest easy in whatever cell they toss me into, that they’re above _torture_? The war may be over," he goes on, and it pains him to think the word he should have used was _lost_ , the war was _lost,_  "but they will seek vengeance for all the deeds they think I’ve dipped my fingers into, until there’s nothing more they can take from me."

Ren sets his jaw, clenching his teeth hard enough to warrant a headache.

"Please."

"I can’t — " Ren starts. " — I _couldn’t_."

Hux’s tone grows desperate. He knows it’s his imagination, the echoing steps of troops marching towards the cell to drag him away, the sickening, unreal feeling that his time is running out. "They’re not going to let you see me again. _Not ever_ , Kylo, so what’s the difference? What does it matter if you do it? _Please_ , _I need you to do this_."

He’s vaguely aware of unwanted tears in his field of vision, and it comes as a shock; he thinks he remembers the sensation from when he was a child — he can feel the nauseating panic rising up in his chest. "Ren — I need you to — "

His words are cut off as Ren crosses the short distance between them and presses his lips to Hux’s, the kiss desperate and almost punishing in its finality, one of Ren’s hands tangling in Hux’s hair, trying to pull him closer, his fingers trembling. He can feel Ren shaking, and he smiles into the kiss, lifting both hands to grasp onto Ren’s robes to reassure him, to convince him, to _plead_.

Hux hears the hum of the saber before he registers the searing pain flaring through his chest. His vision blurs and blackens, doesn’t return until he’s numb, an unexpected chill spreading from his chest outwards. He finds he can no longer stand, his knees buckling, sending him sprawling forward to crash against Ren’s chest. Hux blinks until he just barely makes out Ren’s face in the hazy blur that spans before him. Ren is mouthing something — or _speaking;_  Hux finds himself unable to process the sounds he’s hearing; he’s equally unsure if the blaring alarm is in his head or resounding through the entire base with its shrill pitch — Ren’s repeating it over and over, eyes despairingly wide, features wracked with pain.

Hux fights the sudden weight of his eyelids, forces his eyes to remain open, focuses on Ren’s desperate grip on his waist, keeping them both upright. The room grows taller, Hux feels the distinct sensation of his collapse to the ground, Ren on his knees beside him, keeping his iron grip. It’s a numb weightlessness, a surreal pull towards oblivion, and Hux considers how easy it would be to drift off, to succumb to unconsciousness, let himself slip away.

It’s harder than he’d have expected, to focus his unsteady gaze on Ren’s lips, on the shapes they’re forming, on the words they’re repeating like an anguished prayer.

_I’m sorry._

It dawns on Hux that Ren is apologizing, and it’s far too late for him to string a coherent enough thought together to tell him he didn’t have to say he’s sorry. He can’t move his hands enough to lift a finger and swipe a strand of hair out of Ren’s eyes. He feels nothing.

His breath catches as his lungs refuse to cooperate and he feels his body wracking with a suffocated gasp. Ren’s grip tightens on him, almost comfortingly, and Hux thinks he manages to mutter a broken _thank you_ , wonders if Ren had heard, if he’d seen the words spoken, before there’s relief, and then nothing.

 

 

 

Ren doesn’t resist when his mother finally pulls him to his feet.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by [this art](https://49.media.tumblr.com/17d0193c0762c75aac5d05c9fd74e407/tumblr_o12ridOh8c1r392c5o1_500.gif) by [marvelsoldier](http://marvelsoldier.deviantart.com/art/To-a-Bitter-Death-584869610)


End file.
